[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: John Kerry and War

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John Kerry and War

July 29, 2004
 


 

When he accepts the Democratic presidential nomination
tonight, John Kerry needs to give the nation a clearer idea
of how his choices would have differed from President
Bush's - particularly when it comes to the war in Iraq. The
nation deserves to be told whether Mr. Kerry would have
voted to authorize the invasion if he had known that Saddam
Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. 

Mr. Kerry, as the world already knows, is not a
black-and-white kind of thinker, especially when it comes
to foreign policy. That's good - it should give voters a
real sense of choice this fall, given George Bush's
tendency to view the world in absolutes. But it's not an
excuse for fudging every issue. Mr. Kerry's history on the
critical Iraq question has been impossibly opaque. He voted
to authorize Mr. Bush to go to war. He voted against $87
billion to pay for extra costs - after offering an
amendment to raise the money by increasing taxes on the
wealthy. That produced the infamous explanation, "I
actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted
against it.'' 

Mr. Kerry is very, very sorry for that phrasing. His
campaign is well aware that if he had simply said, "I voted
to spend the money - I just opposed increasing the
deficit," the Republicans would have been deprived of one
of their most salient commercials. We hope he's also sorry
that he tried to parse his votes both ways during the
difficult days of the Democratic primaries, when Howard
Dean's antiwar candidacy was breathing down his neck. 

Mr. Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, have said
that they voted to give the president the power to go to
war to strengthen Mr. Bush's hand with the United Nations.
They also had been given alarming intelligence reports,
which they believed were accurate, showing that Saddam
Hussein was stockpiling biological and chemical weapons and
at least attempting to develop nuclear bombs. 

Those reports were wrong, and Congress was wrong in
presuming that Mr. Bush would go the last mile to get
United Nations support. We can appreciate Mr. Kerry's
complaints that he was misled on both counts. But he and
Mr. Edwards have refused to say whether they would have
acted differently if they had known then what they know
now. That's unfair. When it comes to using force abroad,
voters deserve a clear idea of how high Mr. Kerry would
raise the bar from where Mr. Bush lowered it. 

We know that Mr. Kerry does not rule out preemptive strikes
if a country poses a clear and serious danger to the United
States or its allies - that's longstanding American policy,
and it's in the U.N. charter. But that was not the case
with Iraq. 

Saddam Hussein was a vicious dictator, certainly, who was
continuing to disdain United Nations resolutions on weapons
of mass destruction and refusing to give full access to
weapons inspectors. But we know now that because of the
resolutions and the inspections, Mr. Hussein no longer had
the forbidden weapons, even if he still harbored ambitions
of getting them someday. Knowing that, Mr. Bush still
insists that he was right to invade. He says the war was
justified because of Mr. Hussein's military ambitions and
because Iraq is better off without him. 

Voters need to know whether Mr. Kerry agrees. Or would he
have held back on invading Iraq and chosen instead to
pursue the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the destruction of
the Taliban in Afghanistan, and to focus diplomatic
resources on places like North Korea and Iran? Mr. Kerry's
advisers don't want more accusations of flip-flopping, and
they've told him to avoid hypotheticals. But while voters
are certainly prepared to accept a candidate with a complex
worldview, they also value the courage that comes with
occasionally taking a leap and giving an answer that's
straight and simple. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/29/opinion/29thu1.html?ex=1092117104&ei=1&en=0874a0862a8c5db2


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